Book Reviews

Lawrence Kramer. Music as Cultural Practice: 1800-1900. Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

Reviewed by James Buhler

Lawrence Kramer's ambitious book Music as Cultural Practice:

1800-1900 offers a defense of "the much-disputed idea that music
means something, or better yet, something we can talk about" (xi).
Indeed, he hopes "to appropriate [the] strength of meaning on behalf
of music - and most especially on behalf of textless instrumental music"
(2). A literary critic and author of the influential Music and Poetry J

Kramer has been instrumental in introducing methodologies derived

from post-structuralism and New Historicism into the study of music.
At their best, the hermeneutical analyses that Kramer offers in Music
as Cultural Practice are virtuosic and highly seductive; and if his
interpretations occasionally seem arbitrary or overly fantastic, we can
nevertheless glimpse in his practice, perhaps above all in those most
whimsical of passages, the image of what some future, not-yet-existing
musical hermeneutics might be.
The allure of Kramer's method no doubt stems in large part from
his ability to release associations between music and other aspects of
culture that formalist methods have long suppressed while at the same
time retaining a prominent place for those methods in his interpretive
practice. Indeed, Kramer folds elements of harmonic, motivic, formal,
and Schenkerian analysis into his interpretations, and this is one reason
why it is appropriate for music theorists to devote attention to this
book.
The manner in which Kramer employs music analysis to mediate
between music and other aspects of culture is impressive and always
instructive. Kramer treats the analysis, like the work from which it
derives, as an object that is itself in need of interpretation. Although for
Kramer analysis can reveal something crucial about a work, without
interpretation that analysis remains as enigmatic as the work that the
122 Indiana Theory Review Vol. 15/2
analysis is supposed to elucidate. Analysis becomes a means by which
Kramer, borrowing a term from J. L. Austin,l identifies the "illocu-
tionary force" of music, "the pressure or power that a [musical]
speech act exerts on a situation" (7). If the musical work is the
sedimentation of illocutionary force within a specifically musical
medium, then analysis can help us uncover those points in the work
where that force puts the work under stress. Kramer explores the
structural similarities between these musical tensions and those he finds
in other "cultural practices," such as art, literature, and
psychoanalysis.
In Chapter Two, for instance, Kramer reads the individual
movements of each of Beethoven's two-movement piano sonatas as
structural parallels of one another; he interprets these sonatas as
instances of "expressive doubling," where one movement of the pair
"represents the transposition of the other to a higher or deeper plane,
a more brilliant or profound register" (30). Likewise, in Chapter Three
Kramer tells us that Chopin's Prelude in A Minor is one of those works
that "sound abnormal, and cannot be made to sound otherwise" (91);
this prelude becomes an instance of an "impossible object," a work in
which "subjective incoherence ... becomes articulate" (92). Liszt's
musical portraits of Faust and Gretchen in the Faust Symphony, the
subject of Chapter Four, allow Kramer "to rethink the representation
of gender in the nineteenth century" (103); here, in an interesting
reversal of the usual procedure of interpreting program music, Kramer
is less concerned with what Goethe's Faust can tell us about Liszt's
music than with what Liszt's music can tell us about how the gender
relations of Goethe's Faust were conceptualized in the mid-nineteenth
century. In Chapter Five Kramer moves from gender to sexuality and
suggests that the structural processes of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
and Hugo Wolf's "Ganymede" "(re)articulate certain radical changes
in the concept of sexuality that emerge in late-nineteenth-century
culture" (135).
The problems in Kramer's interpretations do not simply disappear

L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, ed. 1. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa,
11.
2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
Book Reviews 123

if we arrive at better analytical representations, and so it would be petty

to quibble too much with the details of his analyses. For Kramer is far
more interested in how it is that music, despite its lack of a linguistic
content, nevertheless manages to resonate outside of its purely musical
context and to attain a culturally mediated significance-in short, how
it is that music comes to be a cultural practice. That is, the central
question that Kramer's book poses is not How do we go about
generating the best analytical representations possible?, but rather How
do we deploy any kind of analysis in an interpretive (hermeneutic)
argument? This is a theoretical question rather than an interpretive one,
although it is not a question that music theory is accustomed to asking-
or answering. It is a question, in fact, whose answer demands
philosophical speculation on the nature of analytical representation and
on the relation between music and language. From this perspective,
some of Kramer's seemingly arbitrary interpretive decisions-that the
two-movement Beethoven piano sonatas represent an attempt to work
out alternative solutions to the same basic premise, or that' 'the musical
parallelism between [sections of Hugo Wolf's 'Ganymede'] testifies to
their libidinal parallelism" (174) -may be understood as the symptoms
of underlying and, for the most part, unacknowledged theoretical
problems within his text. Since it is in the first and last chapters of the
book that Kramer raises theoretical issues at length, this review will be
primarily concerned with the arguments of these two chapters.
The first chapter sketches what Kramer calls an "Outline of
Musical Hermeneutics. " Here Kramer develops techniques for
"opening hermeneutic windows" on pieces. He identifies three types
of windows. The first type, textual inclusions, consists of "texts set to
music, titles, epigrams, programs, notes to the score, and sometimes
even expression markings" (9). The second type of hermeneutic
window, closely related to the first, Kramer refers to as citational
inclusions, which consist of less-than-explicit allusions to other musical
works or art works. Finally, Kramer calls the third type of window
structural tropes. "The most powerful of hermeneutic windows," the
structural trope is "a structural procedure, capable of various practical
realizations, that also functions as a typical expressive act within a
certain cultural/historical framework" (10). More latent than immanent
124 Indiana Theory Review Vol. 15/2
within the piece, the structural trope is located at those points that are
(structurally) problematic in the piece-those places within the work
where structural tensions, and the illocutionary force of music that
sustains them, become manifest. The structural problem suggests
affinities with similar problems in other cultural fields: "guided by the
problem posed by the breaking point, we begin to play with analogies
and recategorizations, seeking to throw light on one object by seeking
out its multiple affiliations with others" (13). The point then is "to
allow musical and non-musical materials to comment on, criticize, or
reinterpret each other" (17). Kramer's idea here is that similar kinds
of structural tropes occur in different cultural media, that these tropes
can be analyzed and compared, and that these tropes articulate certain
cultural practices through their appropriation of, transformation of, and
resistance to underlying cultural structures.
Kramer is not always clear as to whether the structural trope is
in the work (that is, is an immanent property of the work) or whether
it is a product of Kramer's reading of the work (that is, is a latent
property of the work). The structural trope begins as a product of
interpretation, a supplement to the immanent properties of the work and
so also properly exterior to those properties. But Kramer soon
transforms supplement into complement, exterior into interior, as the
latent qualities of the structural trope become something real, something
immanent, something that was "in the air" (25). (Kramer makes this
comment about the structural trope of "expressive doubling" that he
finds in Beethoven's two-movement sonatas.)
Kramer suggests that this hermeneutic practice remains
fundamentally unaltered by its object (music, literature, philosophy,
painting, etc.) -that hermeneutic interpretation remains indifferent to
the medium of what it interprets. "Under the hermeneutic attitude,
there is and can be no fundamental difference between interpreting a
written text and interpreting a work of music - or any other product or
practice of culture" (6). He proceeds in a straightforward manner to
suggest that the difficulty of interpreting music can be solved with the
correct critical technology: "we should now know how to develop the
techniques we need [to interpret music]; ... we must learn, first, how
to open hermeneutic windows . . . and, second, how to treat works of
Book Reviews 125

music as fields of humanly significant action" (6). The almost giddy

optimism of this passage reduces the specific problem of musical
interpretation to a "lack" of technique. It also posits a hidden assertion
of technological progress: the impasse over interpretation can be
overcome if only we develop the right tools. The seemingly explicit
content of literature and art makes interpretation there seem a more
straightforward endeavor than it actually is; but such a view of
literature and art ignores the complex relationship between the figural
and literal level of the work. 2 In reality, as Kramer is no doubt aware,
the relationship between these levels is no easier to interpret in
literature and art than is the relationship between musical technique and
musical significance. 3 Music's lack of an explicit semantic dimension
just makes the divide more explicit and, hence, renders the problems
endemic to interpreting it more overt. The right tools do not in fact
make interpretation any less problematic (although they may, perhaps,
make it ultimately more satisfying), a point over which Kramer passes
in silence.
"Interpretation, " Kramer tells us, "takes flight from breaking
points, which usually means from points of under- and over-
determination" (12). Breaking points thus become "sources of
understanding" (13); the search for points of rupture becomes a search
for what is individual in an object, for what can be interpreted. As we
have noted, Kramer conceptualizes the breaking point as a case of a
musical "illocutionary" speech act. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's
critique of Austin's speech-act theory,4 Kramer emphasizes that the
illocutionary force of a musical speech act is radically dependent on
context and, further, that this radical contextuality makes it impossible

2Hayden White, "Commentary: Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical

Discourse," in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 292.

3Kramer does suggest, for instance, that "interpretation is an art modelled on the
experience of [instrumental] music" (16).

4Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey
Hehlman, Glyph 1 (1977): 172-97.
126 Indiana Theory Review Vol. 15/2
"to limit the instability of illocution" (8). Indeed, since speech acts
"presuppose the possibility of their repetition in new contexts" -what
Derrida calls their iterability-they also "necessarily presuppose the
possibility of difference, and hence also the possibility of their being
redirected, reinterpreted" precisely because of this possibility of
repetition, this iterability (8). The very structure of the sign is divided,
as Derrida teaches, between iterability and difference. "One can speak
the words of the same but in another voice, a voice that emerges from
within language to spread itself throughout the whole system, fissuring
it in every direction" (178). Iterability entails the heterogeneity of
language. There can never be just one meaning for a word, phrase,
structure or even style; for that word, phrase, structure or style can be
uttered again and in the act of repetition can become different to the
extent that the context has changed. 5 The always-changing context thus
dislocates meaning and prevents meaning from ever being wholly
identical with itself. Hence, "the prospect of what Austin thinks of as
a 'misfire,' as 'infelicitous' deviation from the norm, is actually the
norm itself" (8). Misfire is the very condition of possibility of
successful, completed communication, and, so, potential misfires are
always already latent in any attempt to complete a speech act. Kramer
generalizes this notion of speech-act theory to music by locating
illocutionary force wherever a musical speech act, what Kramer
identifies as an "act of expression or representation," is iterable and
where "in being produced the act seeks to affect a flow of events, a
developing situation" (9).
"Other-voiced texts," Kramer writes, "are those that accentuate
the always-latent prospect of a misfire, that openly invite a
reinterpretation, a revoicing, of prominent expressive acts" (180). In
particular, this other-voicedness draws on the Derridean concept of
"force," which both supplements and opposes structure. Force,
Kramer tells us, "is temporal and dynamic in character and associated

5The fundamental instability of context generalizes to wider domains, in particular

to that of interpretive practice. As we shall see, Kramer never considers the full
ramifications of this instability for his own interpretive practice, which likewise
presupposes some (relatively stable) context.
Book Reviews 127

with value, beauty, feeling; it is graspable principally as it disrupts

structure and compels change" (176). The supplemental logic that
governs the opposition between force and structure entails that the
lesser term of the pair (force) is the condition of possibility of the
greater term (structure). Without force, structure would not be what it
is; it would, in fact, be impossible. At the same time, however, this
supplementary force also undoes that structure by eroding the stability
of the opposition that had made structure possible in the first place.
Force, as Kramer notes, produces a "strategic dislocation" of
structure, an effect that resists the structure within which it is embedded
and that divests that structure of its authority. By emphasizing how
force "invigorates" rather than resists structure, however, Kramer
places an affirmative spin on Derrida that is not present in the original:
"Though deconstruction is in part a practice of vigilance against the
repressive effects of structure, its larger purpose is to bring forth an
affirmative energy by which both force and structure can invigorate
each other" (177). What is missing in Kramer's affirmation of Derrida
is the sense in which a supplement such as force not only appropriates
what it supplements but also always already breaches that
appropriation. Only one who is insensitive to images of death in
Derrida's text, to Derrida' s uncovering of the grim struggle of language
against itself, could read his exposition of the supplement as exclusively
affirmative in tone. 6 Derrida writes, for instance, that' 'the supplement
is dangerous in that it threatens us with death.,,7
Other-voiced texts produce what Kramer elsewhere refers to as
narratographic effects.8 And it is in terms of musical narratology,

6 01 Grammatology,trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins

University Press, 1976), 144.

7Ibid., 155. Indeed, theory, for Kramer, is dangerous in that, if taken too literally,
it threatens us with the death of interpretation, of meaning, and ultimately even of
ourselves.

8Kramer, "Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline," Indiana Theory Review

12 (1991): 144-48. In Music as Cultural Practice, Kramer refers to these effects as
"narrative" rather than "narratographic." Here, we adopt the the terminology of the
128 Indiana Theory Review Vol. 15/2
discussed in Chapter Six, that Music as Cultural Practice makes
important theoretical contributions. Kramer clearly perceives such
narratographic effects as unusual occurrences in music. For Kramer,
these effects "constitute a critical or disruptive process rather than a
normative one" (189). Indeed, Kramer is skeptical of reading music as
fundamentally narrative in quality. As he states in his article "Musical
Narratology, " "the very premise of musical narratology is the
recognition that music cannot tell stories.,'9 Instead, he suggests that
instrumental music, especially, "leans more towards lyric than towards
narrative in its organization of successions" (185). While narrative
"[combines] storytelling with the continuous representation of an
epistemological gap," Kramer writes, "the lyric treats as continuities
the epistemological differences on which narrative depends" (189).
Following Mikhail Bakhtin, Kramer conceptualizes the lyric as a
"monological form," by which he means that the lyric is characterized
by "a single subject-position in which the authorial, narrational, and
focussing activities are merged" (188). Certainly, a lyrical text is a
subjective presentation of a series of events, and so not the events
themselves; but the lyrical text emphasizes the immediacy of the
presentation, the subjective experience of those events. The lyrical
subject can produce such immediacy, however, only by remaining
oblivious to the very act of textual production that makes the lyric
possible in the first place-that is, by excluding from figural
representation the self as an agent of textual production.
Since music, according to Kramer, is construed within Western
culture as being primarily a lyrical form, his critique of the lyrical
subj ect also applies to music's lyrical subject. In particular,
instrumental music endows continuity, or rather the figural
representation of continuity, with a value it withholds from disruption.
But this illusion of continuity is as difficult to sustain in music as in the
lyric. Like the lyric, music generally differs from narrative in that' 'the
subject who supposedly produces the music is not represented directly

"Musical Narratology" article since it is more precise.

9Ibid ., 154.
Book Reviews 129

[in the music]" (187). This lack of an immanent musical narrator, of

a narrator inscribed into the very fabric of the musical discourse, is
what allows music to exhibit the symbolic and temporal continuity
characteristic of lyric, indeed perhaps to exhibit it even more
consistently than the literary lyric.
The continuity of music (unlike that of sound) is neither
ontological nor irrevocable: it is always open to discursive challenge
and so to cultural negotiation. Like the lyric, musical continuity can be
disrupted in a way that calls into question the possibility of that
continuity. By accentuating the gap between musical continuity as a
thing produced and the continuous unfolding of sound (the way one
sound follows immediately upon another in temporal sequence) as an
ontological principle of the medium's temporality, disruption allows
music to approach momentarily the condition of narrative.
Disruption, it might be said, structures an opposition between
continuity and its opposite, discontinuity. Like the disruptions
characteristic of narrative, musical disruption blocks the free flow of
time. Such blockages rebound back at the subject, however, drawing
attention to the subject's loss of discursive control rather than to the
subject's mastery of it. In narrative, for instance, we are paradoxically
more aware of the presence of the narrator when the seamless unfolding
of plot is somehow broken, suspended, or in some way problematized -
in short, when we become aware that story and plot are not identical-
than in those (more common) instances when the plot proceeds
smoothly without interruption (186). In the latter case, the presence of
the narrator remains largely transparent, or "maximally covert" in the
terminology of narratology. 10 Kramer suggests that the situation is
similar for music (and indeed for any art form that is primarily lyrical):
"The music narrates in order to fail at narration, to reach the point of
narrative rupture at which the subject breaks through, both dislocated
and dislocating" (202). The price of producing this other voice, this
musical voice capable of producing the effect of narrating, is a
thematization of subjective control presented by means of the narrating

lOSee, for instance, the entry on "narrator" in Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of

Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).
130 Indiana Theory Review Vol. 15/2
subject's loss of discursive mastery. For Kramer "the sudden eruptions
of subjectivity" that project this loss of discursive control "manifest
themselves as impediments to narrative"; they become "signs of an
inability to proceed meaningfully in time" (203).
Other topics of Music as Cultural Practice could have used the
same kind of theoretical attention that Kramer devotes to musical
narratology. For all the discussion of structural tropes, for instance,
Kramer never broaches the central theoretical question of how
structural tropes are related to one another. Only in his article
"Dangerous Liaisons" does Kramer even begin to sketch a theory of
what the significance of similarity between various structural tropes
might be-although even here there is less than of an account than one
might like. 11 In this article, Kramer speaks of "deep structures" rather
than "structural tropes," but what Kramer has to say about deep
structures, or rather about the relationship between the deep structure
of a musical work and that of a literary work, would seem to be
equally valid for relating the structural tropes of literature and music.
Kramer suggests in "Dangerous Liaisons" that the lack of
obvious resemblances between two works of art need not rule out
shared deep structures. He calls such hidden structural similarity
"deep-structural convergence. "12 More generally these convergences
function like analogies, although their lack of resemblance at an
obvious level marks them as a special case of analogy. "Manifest
analogies" can be evaluated somewhat more directly than those that
exhibit only this deep-structural convergence. "When we find a
manifest analogy, " Kramer tells us, "we should assume that one work
is trying to annex certain values associated with another work, or with
a class of others. The analogy will become meaningful to the extent that
we can interpret the values annexed, their impact on the work that
annexes them, and the lack . . . that motivates the effort of

11 Kramer ,
"Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism,"
Nineteenth-Century Music 13, no. 2 (1989): 159-67.

12Ibid., 161.
Book Reviews 131

annexation. ,'13 With the manifest analogy, then, Kramer assumes that
one work of the pair is prior (both historically and philosophically) to
the other and that the later one is in some sense a response to the first,
or a "reading" of it. The second term of a manifest analogy then is to
be interpreted, according to Kramer, as an intentional act of
appropriation of the first.
This assumption of intentionality is not necessary for elucidating
a deep-structural convergence, however. Works that share similar deep
structures seem to be articulating common underlying social tensions or
enforcing common experiences of time and common structures of the
life-world. For this reason we can speak of such convergences as
"cultural practices." "When we claim to find a deep-structural
convergence, " Kramer writes, "we should assume that the convergent
works indirectly affirm a common core of values. ,,14 There is no
implication here that one work is responding to or trying to appropriate
another work. An objection against Kramer-that the comparison of,
say, a Chopin prelude and English Romantic poetry makes little sense
because the relationship between Chopin and this poetry seems so
tenuous and arbitrary 15 -loses force as soon as one realizes that the
structural trope or deep-structural convergence does not imply in any
way that the works (or rather their producers) have knowledge of one
another. 16 That is, similarity of deep structure need not suggest that one
deep structure is a reading of the other. Rather this resemblance is a
product of responding to a similar social structure or situation. It is
latent rather than immanent in the respective texts, a kind of
"unconscious" of the texts that is revealed only by bringing the various

13 Ibid ., 162.

15Kramer makes this comparison in the third chapter.

16A theory of deep-structural convergence must still confront the not-insignificant

problem of spurious correlation of structure, unless we are to make the rather dubious
claim that all structural similarity is necessarily significant.
132 Indiana Theory Review Vol. 15/2
texts into contact with one another. 17
Kramer always seems to locate the meaning of a structural trope
in music by mediating it through something outside music, typically a
literary text, most often some kind of poetry. Hence one of the refrains
of Kramer's approach is the search for a text, the transformation of all
music into texted music: "the imperative to interpret asks us to
recognize that all music is in some sense texted music, music allied to
the cultural activity of text-production." That a text is necessary to
establish the meaning of a structural convergence becomes clear in the
very next sentence: "Where no text is given, our job is to find one, be
it a solid 'Owen Wingrave' or a typical, composite text that we piece
together ourselves. ,,18 Kramer assigns priority to the text, to verbal
discourse. In a certain sense we can understand this move as a response
to the indisputable fact that meaning must normally be couched in
verbal terms in order to be communicated. Kramer tries to repair his
epistemological ranking by once again invoking Derrida's logic of the
supplement, where music functions as a supplement to some text (or
series of texts), which it is the responsibility of the interpreter to
reconstruct. By invoking this logic, Kramer seems to take back the
priority he assigns to the literary text. Unfortunately, his interpretive
technique belies this move. Kramer constantly embarks from and
returns to the supposed greater security of the text. In particular, the
literary text is granted considerably more interpretive autonomy than is
music. Music's slippery voice is silenced, emptied, and then filled with
a literary content that seems more secure. Behind this move perhaps
lies the fear that music does not - or cannot - mean something after all.
Kramer remains skeptical of too much theorizing, insisting that

17In his article "Musical Narratology," Kramer criticizes Anthony Newcomb for
using narrative' 'to install a latent order amid manifest disorder" (146). But Kramer does
not extend this critique to his own position, which likewise depends on the reading of
latent contents from musical works. The question that remains unanswered by Kramer,
and indeed that can only be satisfactorily answered in a theoretical mode that is granted
more than just "provisional" authority, is: What separates the latency of Newcomb's
narratives from that of Kramer's structural tropes?

18Kramer, "Dangerous Liaisons," 167.

Book Reviews 133
"recognizing structural tropes is an empirical, even a catch-as-catch-
can, matter" (12). His attitude toward theory is, in fact, somewhat
ascetic: he employs theory only when necessary to resist theory-to
turn theory against itself and thereby undo the theoretical impulse of
swallowing up what that theory purportedly explains. Hence "each
particular theory [is accorded] only a provisional, implicit, occasional
authority" (14). The danger of theory, Kramer suggests, is that it may
be used to limit rather than to facilitate interpretation.
Kramer sketches theory as a kind of death. Theory is totalizing;
it produces "the illusion that the wavering movement of meaning has
been arrested at last" (16). For Kramer, theory is in fact the death of
interpretation that is also a condition of possibility of interpretive life:
"Deconstruction," Kramer writes in the last sentence of the book, "is
a sign of life" (213). But this statement comes with a necessary caveat:
the system, death, theory is what makes a deconstructive practice
possible in the first place (213). The logic that governs this relationship
between theory and deconstructive practice exactly reproduces that of
the supplement described by Derrida; even the imagery of life and
death, eros and thanatos, remains intact. Derrida writes, "the
dangerous supplement . . . is properly seductive; it leads desire away
from the good path, makes it err far from natural ways, guides it
toward its loss or fall and therefore it is a sort of lapse or scandal." 19
Later, Derrida adds that the supplement is "a substitute that enfeebles,
enslaves, effaces, separates, and falsifies. ' ,20
This theme of substitution is one that operates in Kramer's text
as well. Let us read how the (im)potency of theory is invoked and
revoked, always to be trumped and regulated by interpretive practice:

Though interpretive practices benefit enormously from

hermeneutic theorizing, a hermeneutic theory is only as
good as the interpretations that it underwrites. Freud ...
repeatedly insisted that psychoanalysis was unconvincing as

19Derrida, Of Grammato!ogy, 151.

20Ibid ., 215.
134 Indiana Theory Review Vol. 15/2
a body of theory. Only by doing analysis, by engaging in
the work of interpretation whether as analyst or analysand,
could one be persuaded that Freudian claims are credible
. . . . The same is true of musical hermeneutics . . . . I
will, to be sure, theorize a little in what follows, both about
music and about interpretation. The value of theory,
though, must rest with the interpretive practices that it
empowers. (2)21

Just as Kant, according to Kramer, legislates the range of musical

meaning, so too Kramer legislates the range of theory, as though theory
were merely a supplement to practice, something to be controlled and
regulated so that it does not erode the integrity and freedom of
interpretation. Kramer places boundaries on (theoretical) freedom in
order to ensure the continuation of (interpretive) freedom. Kramer, no
less than Kant, however, "responds ... to the presence of danger"
(4). Why else would Kramer express such deep concern about keeping
the authority of theory "only provisional"? Furthermore, Kramer's
legislation of theory turns authoritarian at the level of interpretation
itself: "The text . . . does not give itself to understanding; it must be
made to yield to understanding" (6, emphasis added). The
interpretation enters the work, uninvited if need be, by opening a
hermeneutic window "through which the discourse of our
understanding can pass." Kramer, however, never specifies how one
is to take such an authoritarian stand against the object while still
allowing that object "its measure of resistance" (16).
Kramer envisions theory not as some kind of fixed entity but as
an adaptable toolkit of techniques oriented toward elucidating the
individual work of art. Interpretation, the pragmatic employment of

210ne wonders what Kramer would do with the well-known claim, which Freud
advanced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that "the aim of all life is death." In the
terms developed here, this claim transmutes into "the aim of all interpretation is
theory. " Interpretation can avoid and regulate theory no more than, and in the same way
that, life can avoid and regulate death. That is, one can to a certain extent defer but
never entirely escape death or theory.
Book Reviews 135

these theories, is something that can be "learned only by example and

performed only by applying tacit, unformalized knowledge to individual
cases' , (14) . Kramer does not so much discount the importance of
theory as place its power at the service of interpretation. In fact, the
interpretive potential of a theory - or as Kramer puts it, "the
interpretive practices it empowers" -regulates the theoretical activity:
theories that prove useful for some interpretive task are legitimated by
nothing more than that utility.
Even so, there is something suspiciously underdetermined about
Kramer's criteria: in particular, the definition of the term "useful" is
suspended in an ambiguous state. Undoubtedly such ambiguity is
purposeful in that it allows and promotes interpretive mobility. But it
also begs a question, one of an infinitely deferred context: To whom
exactly are Kramer's interpretations to be considered useful? We would
not argue with the claim that "good interpretations can never be
manifestly true" (15). We might even go so far as to accept Kramer's
assertion that' 'unlike a true account of something, an interpretation can
never exclude rival, incompatible accounts" (15). Kramer himself does
not take a position on how utility is to be evaluated except to say that
interpretations "convince by their power to sustain a detailed scrutiny
of a text that also reaches deep into the cultural context" (15). Of
course, this criterion just defers the question of relevance and validity
again to the cultural context, or rather to an assertion that detailed
scrutiny of texts that reach deep into cultural contexts, whatever they
may turn out to be, is a useful kind of interpretation to do. Kramer
does not indicate why (or to whom) his kind of interpretation should be
more "useful" than, say, a plain old Schenkerian reduction, which
likewise reaches deep into the musical context of the work but has the
distinct advantage of rigorously theorizing its admittedly narrow
context.
Problems of utility are notoriously difficult to resolve because
utility can be measured by so many different, and even somewhat
incommensurate, standards. (It is unlikely, for instance, that what is
"useful" to a Schenkerian would be identical to what is "useful" for
136 Indiana Theory Review Vol. 15/2
Kramer.22) This is not to cast doubt on Kramer's invocation of utility,
however, so much as it is a call for examining and rigorously
theorizing the posited context that such utility must always presuppose.
One searches without success in Kramer's texts for some
acknowledgement on his part that utility is less than self-certain, or
even that utility is itself a category subject to the intricate mechanism
of cultural negotiation and so is as fluid and unstable as musical
meaning. A central task of theory is to resist interpretation, to push
interpretation as a form of "practical consciousness" (14) to greater
self-reflection. It is this function of theory especially that Kramer
suppresses when he casts theory in a subordinate position with respect
to interpretation. To the extent that theory lives a subaltern existence
in Music as Cultural Practice, it remains a dangerous supplement that
imperils his interpretive practice even while empowering it. The logic
of the supplement suggests that theory always already shapes
interpretation, no matter how often Kramer might intervene to keep
theory subordinate to interpretative practice. If interpretation is
"opportunistic, unruly, and contestatory" (14) when confronted with
theoretical constraints, then the same can be said of theory when it is
placed at the service of interpretation. Theory "cannot be [successfully]
regimented, disciplined, or legislated" any more than interpretation
can.
Ultimately Kramer's interpretive practice suffers from a lack of
theory that might have resisted his interpretive practice. Despite the
genuine insights Kramer offers into the works he interprets, his
admirable resistance to theory frequently passes into complete negation
and so also into an unthinking affirmation of his interpretive practice.
Yet does this affirmation not suggest an interpretive practice that has
itself become totalizing? Does it not testify to the existence of some
unacknowledged, some unresisted theory that underwrites his

22As Marion Guck recently pointed out, Allen Forte's analytical discourse does
indeed construct a definite context for the music he analyzes. What those who object to
his practice must dislike, then, "is not a lack of context, but, in fact, the particular
context in which Forte places the music" (" Analytical Fictions, " Music Theory Spectrum
16, no. 2 [1994]: 223n).
Book Reviews 137

interpretive practice and indeed is necessary to give voice to those

fragmentary, idiosyncratic, and heterogeneous elements of the artwork
that Kramer himself so clearly wants to preserve? Resistance, it should
be noted, cuts both ways. Theory without interpretation may be empty
and lacking in empirical content, but interpretation without theory lacks
sense and meaning, for it is theory that supplies (and problematizes) the
context that makes interpretation possible. By making theory
subordinate to interpretation, Kramer simply inverts a ranking that is
perhaps more typical. Let us read what Kramer, in another context, has
to say about such privileging and overturning: "Newcomb's reading [of
Schumann's works] itself is a trope of overturning, a privileging of
force against structure. And this is problematical, because his own
analyses uncover forces of dislocation that can only be confronted by
reading against or across the force/structure polarity" (190n). We can
reapply this critique against Kramer's own ordering of interpretation
and theory: elevating interpretation above theory is problematic because
Kramer's own interpretive practice uncovers interpretive problems that
can only be confronted by reading against or across the
interpretation/theory polarity. In order to read across this polarity,
however, it is also necessary to grant theory more than "provisional"
authority.
Music as Cultural Practice presents tantalizing hints of a solution
to the always vexing problem of how to link music and analysis to
other aspects of culture. Yet if it ultimately does not deliver on its
promise, this is due to the arbitrary restrictions Kramer places on
theory vis-a-vis interpretation. A better hermeneutic practice will
perhaps emerge when theory and interpretation are allowed instead to
enter into a productive tension where the relationship is governed by
something other than an invisible hand (' 'utility' ') that always already
turns out to fulfill even the most fanciful whims of the interpreter.